Re: request to revert the chnage of revno 112925

[Paul Eggert]

On 06/19/13 13:49, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> This is not specific to Elisp, of course, it's true of most programming
> languages

Yes, that sounds right.  Should we make this change for all
programming-language files then?  .c, .h, Makefile, etc....

> The POSIX world doesn't care too much about labeling files as
> text-vs-binary except when it's really useful (e.g. to try and avoid
> spewing crap in the output of grep).

True, but in practice this means one should avoid putting NUL bytes in
such files.  grep uses a heuristic that if a file contains a NUL byte,
it's considered to be a binary file, and by default grep won't output
the matching lines for that file.  POSIX allows this behavior, and it's
common among many GNU and/or POSIX tools, which means it's typically
not a good idea to put NUL bytes in source files.

Emacs of course can treat a NUL character just like any other
character.  But the issue of UTF-8 versus other encodings is largely
independent of what Emacs does with NUL characters.  It may be better
to leave the treatment of NUL characters alone when making the UTF-8
change, if only to do changes one at a time.

(Can you tell that I use grep a lot?  Sometimes I think it's my
favorite software tool....)